But we found beautiful quarters at last among the snows and the waterfalls below the pass, and we slept under innumerable stars, lulled by the choruses of many waters. We made breakfast at dawn and talked till it was warm. Vachel told me of his past--how he had struggled always against the downward way. People had said to him, “You must make money. You must enter a profession.” When as an art student he had gained some power with the pencil, they had said, “You must enter commercial art”; when as poet he had been recognised, they had said, “You must let us organise and commercialise your gift, turn it into money for you.” “They wanted to Barnumise me,” said my companion, “and take me all over America as a reciting freak. When I refused, they said, ‘You’ll end in the poor-house,’ and I replied, ‘I don’t care: show me the poor-house--let me go to it.’” He had taken to the road to regain his self-respect. He had gone without any money, and in the hospitality and kindness of the farmers he had won a personal faith in the common man and a reliance which was not merely on success. When he harvested in Kansas for two dollars fifty a day, that daily wage was like millions to him. And now with me, when all the world was telling him he must do thus and so, he was finding in the wilderness of the Rockies a new means of escape. “To-morrow,” said he, “we will climb right away to the top and find the pass into new country.” [Illustration] _Who said it was easier to go down, Facilis decensus and the rest? I’ll say it is more painful Than to go up. You think it was great fun a-sliding down the shale On large flat rocks. But it leaves me cold, As the saying is, For the seat of my pants is much thinner._ [Illustration: THEY OUTSTAYED US AND WILL OUTSTAY US] VII. SILENCED BY THE MOUNTAINS MY companion’s secret thought is that he is a Virginian. But how, since he was born in Illinois and his parents in Kentucky? “I am a follower of Poe and Jefferson,” he answers. Kentucky was largely colonised from Virginia, and the poet is ready to claim allegiance to the chivalric, leisurely and flamboyant genius of the South. “If only as a protest against the drab, square-toed, dull, unimaginative America which is gaining on us all,” he adds. He has a passion for ideal democracy, and his great hero of the hour as we stride over the rocks is John Randolph, of Roanoke, who could enter Congress with four hounds and a dog-whip and make speeches to which all must listen. “America,” Lindsay insists, “simply _needs_ the flamboyant to save her soul.” I suppose, because of that faith, he also, Vachel Lindsay, the poet, is a flamboyant genius.